Crowned

“That slip of a girl from Rhenia is playing ruler, coming south with her pretty little army. I’ll have driven her out of Brus by winter, then we can turn our attentions to real threats like the Princess of Aisne.”
– Extract from the correspondence of Prince Dagobert of Lange, dated four months before the fall of Lange

Routine was something Cordelia embraced.

There were only so many hours in a day, to her regret, which made it important to regiment them so she could get the most out of what she had. Rising with dawn, she broke her fast with her closest advisors and took measure of any difficulties they might have encountered. Afterwards she walked the length of the fortress-city’s ramparts, allowing the brisk morning air to finish waking her as she paused to talk with soldiers. It was important, particularly in Lycaonese lands, to have the love of the army. The principality of Rhenia as she’d inherited it was more an army with a land than a land with an army, every institution in it shaped so that they could support country-wide mobilization at any moment. It had been decades since the Chain of Hunger had crossed the Three Rivers in numbers larger than a few hundreds, but her people had long memories: there’d been a time where every spring had thousands of hungry ratlings throwing themselves at the walls. Those days would come again, she knew as every Hasenbach before her had known deep in their bones. And when they did, her principality would be prepared.

For all that, in the two years since she’d become the Prince of Rhenia she had attempted to broaden the horizons of her people. While Lycaonese soldiers fought and died to keep the rest of Procer pristine, southern princes feasted and grew rich while sneering at the coarseness of the very soldiery saving them from the perils of the north. Their lands were fertile, compared to the rocky northern fields, and the numbers of southerners had been swelling for generations. Until recently, anyway. Since the First Prince had died, the rest of the Principate had taken to devouring itself with ugly zeal. The reforms Cordelia had dreamed of as a child, of tying the Lycaonese principalities together through common trade laws and the absence of borders, had been burnt up by the fires of civil war. None of the northern rulers were interested in implementing economic or diplomatic reforms when there might be an Alamans army at their doorstep demanding submission any day. Clearly, any progress to be made would have to wait until a First Prince of Princess was elected.

Or so Cordelia had thought when she was still a child of ten, her mother serving as her regent after a ratling raid took her father’s life. Margaret Hasenbach, once Margaret Papenheim, had never been entirely comfortable ruling the principality. She’d been a field commander for her brother in Hannoven until her marriage and had always balked at having to rule Rhenia when others did the fighting for her. Cordelia had begun taking on responsibilities as seneschal of the keep by age twelve, and by age thirteen effectively ran the fortress and its dependencies while Margaret Ironhand rooted out the ratling nests infesting the mountains. She’d died when Cordelia was fourteen, not by the blades of her enemies but by the affliction known as the bloodless heart. Priests could not heal what had been born weak: they could soothe the pains of the children of the Heavens, but not reverse what the Gods Above had wrought. Cordelia’s uncle, the Prince of Hannoven, had served as her regent for the last year before she came of age but he’d never presumed to contradict her in anything.

Uncle Klaus, a childless widower who’d flatly refused to remarry after the death of his deeply -loved wife, had always treated her more as a daughter than a niece. He’d gone as far as naming her his heir presumptive above any of the branch Papenheims, a decision that had caused some unrest when made official. Even now he was in Rhenia as often as Hannoven, the most trusted of all her councillors. She’d not been shy in leveraging her uncle’s fame as a military commander when forging the four Lyaonese principalities into a single united front, one that would give pause to any southern prince who would command the allegiance of any single Lycaonese ruler by force of arms. In some ways the reforms she’d sought as a youth had come to pass: in her correspondence she now spoke not only for Rhenia and Hannoven but also for Bremen and Neustria, an alliance the match of any of those setting the rest of the Principate aflame. And yet the Alamans and Arlesite rulers she wrote to insisted on treating her as an idiot child, to be deceived into supporting them by honeyed words and empty promises.

Cordelia Hasenbach was nineteen and well-bred, so she did not throw tantrums, but some of the letters she received made her wish she could choke the southerners the same way her mother had famously done to a ratling warlord. Correspondences, as it happened, was what occupied her time for half a bell after touring the fortress walls. On this particular morning she chose to read her missives in the squat hall overlooking the training yard, allowing the sound of drilling recruits to wash over her. A single cup of watered-down wine stood by the sheaths of parchment covering her table, sparsely indulged in. Uncle Klaus was ‘keeping her company’ as she worked, which meant he was resting his elbows on the balustrade, on his third skin of mead and regularly heckling the recruits below. Decorum was rarely a skill Lycaonese rulers prized, to her despair. Cordelia put down the letter she’d been reading and reached for the wine, allowing herself a fuller sip than usual.

A shame she despised the sensation of being drunk. After that letter, it felt almost warranted.

“Your father got that same look on his face, whenever people wanted him to arbitrate farming disputes,” Uncle Klaus said, laughter in his eyes.

The Prince of Rhenia put down her cup gingerly, touching her pristine lips with a cloth as etiquette dictated when a highborn lady drank spirits.

“Not an inapt metaphor, considering the pettiness of what was put to ink,” she admitted.

Klaus snorted, fingers coming up to put a semblance of order to his salt-and-pepper beard. It was getting shaggy, Cordelia noted. She’d have to arrange for a barber to attend him tonight, one that would not be cowed by her uncle’s ferocious scowling.

“You’re still talking to those idiots down south?” he said. “I don’t know where you got that patience of yours from, because it’s certainly not your mother.”

“One of those southern princes is likely to rule Procer in the years to come,” Cordelia said. “Cultivating a civil relationship before the ascension can only be to our benefit.”

The older man chuckled, dropping down on the seat across from her and bringing the skin of mead to his mouth to pull at it.

“And how is that civility going?” he asked.

Well-bred ladies did not scowl, Cordelia told herself. They were not, however, above having a man’s favourite fur coverlet disappeared and replaced with a fancy velour one. She’d even see to it it was embroidered in the Arlesite way, with fragments of courtly poetry and scenes of duels fought for praise and honour.

“Cleves and Hainaut pledge neutrality in all fights to come,” she said. “If they take any more losses they will no longer be able to effectively watch over the Tomb.”

“They never should have sent men south,” Uncle Klaus growled. “Just because the Dead King’s being quiet doesn’t mean he’s not watching. They have a duty, like we do.”

Cordelia rather thought he uncle was doing those particular princes injustice, but she did not comment. The principalities of Cleves and Hainaut formed, with Rhenia and Hannoven, what should be considered Procer’s most vital line of defence. If the Kingdom of the Dead began looking outwards again, they would be the ones charged with holding the line until southern armies could be mustered. The fair-haired Prince of Rhenia agreed with her uncle that above all those rulers should look to seeing their walls fully manned, but these were ultimately Alamans princes. They were more involved in the Ebb and the Flow than northerners, bound by the intricate webs of alliance that spanned the centre of the Principate. Neutrality from the onset would have been difficult for them to maintain, with their cousins and nephews taking up arms so close to their own borders.

“Those pledges are the only pleasant news this day has brought,” Cordelia said. “The rest is… unpromising.”

“Aequitan and their allies got whipped all the way out of Creusens,” Klaus frowned. “That should knock them out of the war. With his back secure, Lange will go after Aisne – the winner of that tussle will get the crown, by my reckoning.”

“Princess Aenor of Aequitan raised another army as of the last fortnight,” the fair-haired prince said. “Levies armed with dwarven weapons. They will resume their offensive as soon as they have gathered in sufficient numbers.”

The Prince of Hannoven scowled.

“That’s the third host she wrecked on the field,” he said. “Who’d be fool enough to lend her the coin for a fourth?”

It had taken her years, to ferret out that it was the Tower pouring gold into the defeated princes of Procer. Years and the help of her cousin, become the Augur by the grace of the Heavens. She’d related that truth to every ruler in Procer within the month after she’d acquired solid proof, to warn them from allowing the Dread Empress to continue fanning the flames of civil war. To no avail. The still took loans, still raised armies with them, and after near two decades of strife hatreds now ran so deep princes would rather be up to their neck in Praesi debt rather than allow their rivals to triumph. It was madness, the worst kind of madness. The first fluctuating alliances had eventually turned into a handful of steady blocs that bloodied each other on the field every summer without ever coming closer to the crown, ruining the very Principate they wanted to rule. Fields were going fallow, trade was effectively dead and rulers spent peasants like coin. The sheer disregard princes where showing to the men and women they were supposed to rule disgusted her deeply.

“They will not listen, Uncle Klaus,” she said tiredly. “They do not care anymore. Dagobert of Lange demands we raise our armies and support his claim, or suffer brutal taxes under his reign. Constance of Aisne offers to recognize me as overlord of all Lycaonese if I assault Dagobert’s back, as if this sort of splintering would not effectively dismantle the Principate.”

Cordelia allowed herself to sigh. This kind of thinking, she knew, was common among Lycaonese. Let the southerners kill each other, what did the people of the mountains care for it? It would also be the death of the greatest nation Calernia had ever seen. A brutal but swift civil war would not have allowed for entire regions of the Principate to grow to despise each other. This drawn-out farce, however? As of this moment, Procer was effectively divided between four or five kingdoms that would rather see their cities burn than allow one of the others to rule over them. Another decade of this and it would be the end of the Principate. The fracture lines were already visible and growing deeper by the year.

“We have a duty, Uncle,” Cordelia said.

“To fucking Dagobert of Lange?” Klaus laughed. “I wouldn’t toss the bastard a copper if he was begging on the street. We owe that man nothing.”

“Think beyond our borders,” the blonde woman said. “Think of what it means, if Procer splinters.”

“It means we don’t send coin south ever again to men who’ve never seen the Grave,” the Prince of Hannoven said coldly. “It means green boys who’ve never fought a ratling don’t get to feast away spring while my people die for their sake.”

“Levant will gobble up at least Orense,” Cordelia assessed clinically. “Likely Segovia as well. Tenerife will become either one of the Free Cities or a dependency of Helike. The Dread Empire will take Bayeux and Orne before a decade has passed.”

“And why is that our business?” Klaus grunted.

“When the Dead King rouses his armies and crosses the lakes,” Cordelia said quietly, “who stands with us?”

She met her uncle’s eyes.

“When the Chain of Hunger gathers the might for an invasion, who bolsters our strength?” she said.

“We’ve held them back since before there was a Principate,” her uncle replied.

“We turned them a way as a nation that spreads from here to Valencis,” Cordelia said. “That is why Procer exists, Uncle. Because Triumphant slaughtered so many of us we had to band together as a nation or see ourselves devoured by our neighbours.”

“So now you want us to bleed for some princeling in silk,” Klaus said bitterly. “That’s always the way, isn’t it? The south makes a mess and we foot the bill.”

There was a truth in that, and for all that Cordelia had eschewed many of her people’s customs she was not beyond feeling that bitterness herself. Was she to entrust the fate of her people to a grasping idiot like the Prince of Lange? To the Princess of Aequitan, who would rather take Praesi gold than bow her head for the sake of the Principate?

“No,” she said. “Not this time.”

“Cordelia?” her uncle said.

Cordelia Hasenbach felt serenity take hold of her, for the first time in years. Her path was clear, finally. If no one else, then I.

“Send messengers,” she ordered. “To every tower, every hold, every fortress. We gather for war. Anyone we can afford to take from the defences comes with us.”

The greying man frowned.

“And who do we fight for?”

“The First Prince of Procer,” she said. “Cordelia Hasenbach, first of her name.”

Gods save them all, but she would salvage a nation out of this madness. No matter the cost.

That term was used to describe Catherine the Great at one point I believe. So yeah, people are ideots. Also, side note: I love that how most of the great rulers are women. Cordelia, Triumphant, Malieca… Cat will get there in her own time, heck, even Juniper is the possibly the greatest general of her age.

Terms like that also got thrown at Maria Theresa. And, if any “slip of a girl” was a Grade A, stainless steel and gifted battle axe coming out of the gate, she was. That woman had a backbone of made of a high titanium and tungsten amalgam and balls of carbon fibre. 🙂

Personally I’d prefer a more even spread. Don’t get me wrong, I love Malicia and Cat, Juniper and Ranger, and I rather like Cordelia, but I kinda wanna see competent male rulers too. Would be nice to know more about Terriblis II for example, he seemed to have had his head on the game. Problem is, apart from the Free Cities and the Kingdom Under, I don’t think there’s a place in the continent where such a one may be found.
It would also be a treat to know more about historical personage such as Jehan the Wise, the Queen of Blades, how the Dead King came to be, etc………and no, the Tyrant of Hellike doesn’t count as a competent ruler.

Given how many works feature nominally egalitarian societies where most important people are nevertheless men, often to an even greater extent than the gender imbalance in PGTE, I’m perfectly happy with some stories trying so hard to drag the average closer to 50/50.

That’s a sample size of 3, which I’m pretty sure is just coincidence. Coincidence and the fact that Names encourage gender equality because they come with rough equality to men and women, meaning that they have a fair chance of ascending to positions of power. It’s also worth noting that only one of those three women didn’t have a male tactician they couldn’t have succeeded without.

Now that I think of it, it does strike me that most of the best leaders and statespeople we know of seem to be female while most of the best tacticians are male. On one side we have Black, Terribilus II, Theodosius/the dead king, and Klaus. On the other we have Malicia, Cordelia, Regalia, and Hye (yes I know that she’s a badass fighter, but she doesn’t lead armies and she does run a functional city-state). Really the only one I can think of who crosses the line is Triumphant.

Istrid and Juniper are admittedly great generals, but so is Stacker, and in a way Cat is the leader half of the bargain with the way that she keeps morale high and manages the loyalty of her troops.

I really have no clue where to put Kairos, but he’s something of a wild card and possibly in his own category.

Yes, the whole, “If no one else will,” and “If it’s going to be anyone it has to be me” ideology very much aligned. I feel like Cordelia is what Cat would be if she swung more towards her good twin than her evil twin.

How did that work? She basically saw exactly what was wrong, what nobody else was willing to see when she showed them, and then she acted exactly like they did and should have had exactly the same results. I don’t actually know if the story about crabs trying to escape from pots is true, but it definitely does apply to humans and I don’t think even Cordelia’s armies could have stood against the entire rest of the Principate once it realized she was winning.

She had a better trained army than the rest who had basically been reduced to hiring mercenaries and such. She had better strategic acumen than all the others and her uncle who is a brilliant commander. And mostly she had an augur named who is a brilliant information gatherer and saved her from assassination several times. I doubt it was easy but it was eminently doable. Also highly likely that by the time the rest gave up old hatreds and political ambitions to gang up against her, it would have been too late.

And if they did, it would have been a phyrric victory for her- which is not to say it would not have been a victory-through defeat. If she achieved their unity, *against her* might not make a world of difference.

Good is like that, if the Evil side starts to approach achieving a truly significant victory then the forces of Good get a last-second power-up or a divine intervention. The Augur and the crippled armies are both examples of how Good is not nice, just righteous.

Cordelia is honestly such a great (and even sympathetic) character that I’m torn between who to root for. It would be great if we got more insights into her conquest through these interludes (kinda like the multi-part Hakram arcs)

Working with Cordelia would probably mean going from defiance and disobedience against the Tower to outright treason. At this point a closer, more fair and functional relationship with the Tower is the path towards the Callowan prosperity that Cat wants above all else, and Cordelia isn’t likely to ever make peace with the tower no matter what reparations they offer her. Besides, even if she does seem sympathetic recall that the considered the fact that Black and Malicia were raising the standards of living in Callow to be a bad thing because it inconvenienced her. That kind of thinking is the difference between someone you can work with and a Good fanatic. Recall also that Will was perhaps even more sympathetic and he chose to inflict a fate arguably worse than death of thousands of people rather than admit that he had made a mistake. That should give you a good sense of how dangerous Good fanaticism can be.

Good world building! but we don’t learn much here:/ her relationship with her uncle and her lifestyle have already been described in several interlude;) and we already know she went to war because nobody else can take care of her country…seems to me anyway^^
Apart a few names of dead people this chapter don’t bring much.
Still,this is the start of the resolve from one of the main protagonist/antagonist(don’t know anymore^^) and that mean a lot.

Even if First Prince isn’t a Name, after that final display I’m surprised Cordelia doesn’t have one. What was it Black said at the beginning? What separates the Named from the NPCs is the Will to see an objective and obtain it?

Something like that. On the other hand, that willpower is just one of multiple prerequisites to gain a Name. Another is an appropriate Name unclaimed and ready for them to take, and I’m not sure if such a Name was available for Cordelia. If the royalty don’t come with automatic Names that means that there probably aren’t any fitting to them, and there might even be a tradition that Named do not become rulers in Procer.

She’s an atypical Lycaonese though. If Names follow cultures then Procer might be divided between Lycaonese, Arlesites and Alamans, and the Names normal to the first might just not fit her well. This would also fit with First Prince not being a Name.

names have been said to come from
the culture of a kingdom, so if a kingdom does not have a basis/story in names -> no names are given. no matter how “nameish” cordelia is, she is inherently unlikely to become named, due to her current status.

“any progress to be made would have to wait until a First Prince [of->or] Princess was elected.”
“Correspondences, as it happened, [was->were] what occupied her time” alternatively, “correspondence, as it happened, was what occupied her time”

Yeah, that of/or thing is (and others like it are) much more of a stumbling block than all the usual brain-will-autocorrect one-letter-mistakes, because both versions are actual words..
Careful with those.

Wait… gah. Brain, what did you do… prank… -.- the physical ones…. Yeah, forget about that last remark. But i seriously would like to watch, from a safe place where they or the collateral damage cannot reach me =P

How long before the beginning of the story was this chapter supposed to be set? I think I may have been seriously overestimating Cordelia’s age. I was picturing a middle-aged woman but it sounds like she can’t be much older than 30 tops.

In her own way though, Cordelia is just fanning the flames she herself identifies most clearly as the blaze burning her country down. Yes, with the benefit of hindsight, we know it turned out well. At the time however, far from being assured of victory, Cordelia was just adding another combatant for the Crown to a field already crowded with combatants. Had things gone the slightest bit differently, all she might’ve accomplished was tacking on still more years before the civil war ended.

Cat’s circumstances were much different. When she set out, she was risking only her own neck. Even when she made her big play by letting the Lone Swordsman go free to kindle rebellion, all she was doing was accelerating *by a few years* an anti-Praesi backlash-centered Rebellion with its roots in the Conquest itself. A rebellion Black and Malicia had both declared was 100% inevitable, whatever Cat’s actions had been. Cat was essentially only murdering people to achieve her political ends that were certainly going to die 4-7 years further on anyways.

Cordelia risked four provinces of the Principate becoming the anthricite coal-laden logs that would’ve allowed the Principate to burn another twenty years as a first move. The fact Cordelia has plot armor because of the author does not in any way mean she wasn’t just as guilty, though for more high-flown moral reasons than her rivals, of the crime being committed by them.

Hell, her Uncle’s chastisement of the two provinces that finally declared themselves neutral could apply to Cordelia. They sent men intended to stand ready to bolster the initial defense against the Dead King to fight in the civil war. Cordelia did with men meant to buttress defense against the Chain of Hunger what others were doing in the south.

The key here is they never would have been reunited anyways, they would be swallowed up bit by bit by competing empires and factions. The Principate of Procer was already dead and by not acting she would have no chance to fix anything rather than a long shot.

Furthermore, She already pointed out that they can’t hold the Northern front forever and if a large enough rattling war band comes they are all fucked unless they get reinforcements.

The point of their line of defense was to stall an invading force of ratlings long enough for reinforcements to arrive and not to stop them cold, but that does not make it any less vital that they hold the line until those reinforcements do arrive, or her dereliction of duty any less risky. Of course, if Procer collapsed and the people who claimed the land were less concerned about the Chain of Hunger then she would have been doomed anyway, so an argument could be made that she was trying to avoid a larger risk.

“That slip of a girl from Rhenia is playing ruler, coming south with her pretty little army. I’ll have driven her out of Brus by winter, then we can turn our attentions to real threats like the Princess of Aisne.”

It is a pity that Prince Dagobert wasn’t a bit more genre-savvy. Otherwise, he’d know:
“Slip of a girl” > “Meh, I can take her…”

insert a "that" between the two its; two times the same word after the other is just an unnecessary stumbling block, "that" is only left out when it helps to quicken the sentence – this hear does the opposite. 😉

Sorry, if this keeps on I’ll have to do a text first next time instead of posting finds as I read on…
Another one of those darned ones:
>> The still took loans, still raised armies with them << "They", not "the".

>> after near two decades of strife hatreds now ran so deep princes would rather be up to their neck in Praesi debt rather than allow their rivals to triumph. <> We turned them a way as a nation that spreads from here to Valencis <> If no one else, then I. <<
Now this one is a bit dubious… “then I will/have to xy?” or “then it must be ME” ? The pronoun is another one and “I” feels strange here, just with other such cases discussed before 1-2 chapters past. The latter differential (if no one else is appropriate, then it must/should be ME) seems, contextually, to be much more likely thus the “I” feeling strange because of it and a sentiment to want to turn it into “me” instead.

Gods. Why do my spaces/paragraphs get “eaten” when posting here?? -.- This is annoying. How do I avoid that? It didn’t show up with paragraphs deleted when I copied it here, so I have no idea why this happened. -.-

Oh no, wait… it actually swallowed not only paragraphs, but WHOLE SENTENCES. ARGH.

I’ll have to try again, or this makes no sense at all, sorry:
————
>> after near two decades of strife hatreds now ran so deep princes would rather be up to their neck in Praesi debt rather than allow their rivals to triumph. < one “rather” too much. Get rid of the second one : “would rather be … in Praesi debt [ — ] than… “

———-

>> We turned them a way as a nation that spreads from here to Valencis < “away”, one word, not “a way”.

Important difference and real stumbling block because both are words and it thus muddles the sentence meaning and shunts readers out of the reading flow [ won’t say that again – it’s always the same with this kind of typos 😉 ]

————
>> If no one else, then I. < Now this one is a bit dubious… “then I will/have to xy?” or “then it must be ME” ?

The pronoun is another one in case A versus case B — and “I” feels strange here, just with other such cases discussed before 1-2 chapters past. The latter differential (if no one else is appropriate, then it must/should be ME) seems, contextually, to be much more likely thus the “I” feeling strange because of it and a sentiment to want to turn it into “me” instead.

AGAIN. It swallowed half the sentence… Argh. It should have read: swallowed all my second ending arrowheads, the paragraph, and then the two hyphens plus one arrowhead to form an arrow at the start of the new line. I have absolutely no idea why this happens, but it would seem the reply section somehow does not like the arrows and hyphens right now, as the underlying problem, I guess. It swallowed the second ending arrowhead in the quote, too. Strangely enough, the arrowheads at the start look fine. oO What the heck.